Over at the ISC Blog, Wolfgang Gentzsch writes that ever-increasing complexity in high performance comuting is driving the need for HPC in the Cloud.

Rather than having to rely on a corporate IT department to procure, install and wire HPC servers and services into the data center, there is the notion of self-service, where users access a cloud portal and make a request for compute and data servers with specific hardware or software characteristics, and have them provisioned automatically in a matter of minutes. When no longer needed, the underlying resources are put back into the cloud to service the next customer. This notion of disposable computing dramatically reduces the barrier for research and development, in research and industry! Clouds will surely revolutionize how HPC is applied because of its utilitarian usage model. Clouds will make HPC and data processing genuinely mainstream.